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Vilnius: Knights, Russians…And Frank Zappa
Tuesday’s snow melts away quickly as a rise in the mercury brings heavy grey skies and occasional drizzle, the ice patches on the uneven pavements are once again just harmless puddles. A 17-mile train ride out of the capital brings us to Trakai, a lakeside town which in summer is a popular destination for city dwellers and tourists alike. Trakai is a town surrounded by water, built on both lakeside flatlands and grassy peninsulas, and is a ramshackle mix of timber clad houses and characterless rectangular apartment blocks, but its popularity is down not just to its watery location but also to its stunning castle structures. One of the castles…
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Vilnius: Stories And Histories
Imagine walking across a bridge in the middle of a capital city and being met with a sign on a shop wall reading “border control”, passing entry instructions to the Republic which include a smile icon, multiple flags with an open palm as the centrepiece, and then finding yourself alongside a wall with the Republic’s constitution detailed in over 40 languages, including such clauses as… “Everyone has the right to die, but this is not an obligation” “Everyone has the right to be happy” “Everyone has the right to be unhappy” “Everyone has the right to have no rights” And concludes with the Republic’s motto… “Do not defeat…do not fight…
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Wintry Days In Vilnius
The temperature touches minus 7 as we head back to the hotel after our evening meal, frost forming fern patterns on car windscreens and turning pavement puddles into treacherous mini skating rinks. But the air is clean and crisp, the moon is bright and we breathe in the tastes of proper winter for the first time in a long time. By first light next morning the snow is falling and the cobbled streets have a covering of pure white as workers shuffle to offices and factories, huddled inside heavy overcoats and hidden behind hats and scarves. For us this is a bonus: we hadn’t expected to see snow this early…
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Opening Doors To New Destinations
This week it will be a calendar month since we arrived home from Greece, and we seem to have spent a good deal of that time watching and waiting for the time when we can book our COVID booster jab. It seemed to us that the undeniably most sensible course of action was to wait until the booster jab was sorted before we looked at setting off on another lengthy adventure. Our patience broke though, and we quickly put a pre-booster short city break in the diary for later in November. Then, at the weekend, our raspberry-and-yoghurt breakfast was interrupted by a whoop of joy as the booster rules changed…
